¶ … Economic Depression in 1929
The Great Depression of the 1930s began with the stock market crash in October 1929. When this occurred, Herbert Hoover was president, and he did not do enough, in many people's opinion, to end the depression. In fact, many of the "shanty" towns where homeless, out of work people lived were called "Hoovervilles." Republican Hoover took a stand back and wait approach, he felt that American business would rebound, and that it was not the business of government to get involved in creating jobs. Hoover understood he needed to make changes, but many of the changes he attempted failed, due to a Democratic Congress and a strained federal budget. The country continued to blame Hoover as the depression worsened, and threw more and more people out of work. He did initiate work programs and economic legislation, but it was not enough to put the country back to work.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, was elected president and he took office in March 1933. In his first one hundred days in office he created massive reforms calculated to get the country back to work and economically viable again. He created the Work Projects Act (WPA), which created thousands of government jobs building roads, public projects like dams, and other projects designed to get people back to work. His programs were known as the "New Deal," and included a social security pension plan for retired workers, unemployment insurance, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which ensured Americans would not lose their savings in bank closures, as they had when the stock market crashed, and banks could not afford to pay out money to all their depositors. Both men tried to end the depression, but Roosevelt was successful because he had an aggressive plan to create change in the country, and he has the support of a Democratic Congress. Roosevelt met disaster head on and aggressively, while Hoover did not, and that is probably the biggest difference between the two men and their approaches to ending the Great Depression.
